I had a very interesting conversation about climate change with my two friends yesterday while we rode our bikes throughout Eugene. It all started when my friend Andrew remarked, “Wow. I can’t believe it’s March and it’s this beautiful outside. Maybe global warming isn’t so bad?” The three of us let out a chuckle as we pedaled along the Willamette river.

That comment sparked an hour long discussion about pollution, global economics, rising sea levels, and the agriculture industry, and how they all pertain to global warming. I told them about a video I saw recently from the documentary Chasing Ice that captured the largest glacier calving ever filmed. Over the course of a 77 minute time-lapse, a Manhattan-sized glacier calves and rushes into the sea. The video left me breathless because it truly captured the awesome power and scale of mother nature. I used this video to explain the potential impacts that global warming could have on glaciers worldwide, and how a rising sea-level would be catastrophic to most of the world’s population.

My friend Damon interrupted and asked, “Isn’t the sea-level only going to rise like 2 meters? That doesn’t see like that much.” I told him about a recent Vice HBO episode that chronicled global warming’s effects on the glaciers of Antartica, specifically the Thwaites glacier located on the West coast of the continent. Scientists have concluded that the Thwaites glacier is melting at an extremely fast rate and will detach from the continent, raising the global sea level by 1 meter. This single glacier, with a diameter of around 21km, has the power to remap the entire planet. According to VICE, a 1 meter sea-level rise will put around 17% of Bangladesh and most of the southern tip of Florida underwater. To put that into more understandable terms, a scientist remarks, “Sea-level rise will create over 300 million climate change refugees, that will need to be taken care of somehow.”

Damon’s eyes widened when I told him that last fact. He remarked, “There is no way that the world could support 300 million refugees without a drastic lifestyle change of every person on the planet.” He went on to talk about how we, especially Americans, have not been living within our means. He talked about how society has created an unsustainable demand for food and fossil fuels, which in turn has spearheaded pollution and climate change. It was interesting to discuss how our own lifestyles have propelled climate change, and the only way to change thins was to look no further than ourselves.

We tried to end the conversation by trying to find any positives around climate change. It was Andrew who said, “Global warming is going to define our generation, and how we react to it will determine the fate of the entire human race. It is scary, but I find that we constantly underestimate the vigor and adaptability of the human race. We’ll give it our best shot. I know we will.”

The meeting our class attended on Friday was really quite eye opening. I actually did not know that Bill McKibben had been arrested several times during his climate activism, and it was very interesting hearing his thoughts and perspectives on the issue in person. He brought up a lot of points that have me worried about the future in mitigating climate change, and the obstacles that those who wish to mitigate climate change face. Money and lobbying play a huge role in the U.S. political system, and a lot of policy directives that Congress enacts come from corporate and lobbying interests. He brought up specific pair of brothers that seem to be playing a bigger and bigger role in our legislative process. The Koch brothers, who made their fortune and have amassed a huge amount of wealth in the fossil fuel industry, have been active in the U.S. political lobbying system for a long time, but with the recent supreme court decisions like Citizens United vs. FEC and McCutcheon vs FEC, the flow of money in the form of campaign contributions and political donations has skyrocketed. The Koch brothers have poured massive amounts of money in to organizations and politicians who oppose or deny climate change as well as climate scientists in general, and have pledged to use nearly a billion dollars in campaign contributions in the next election cycle.

With the new Republican congress, things seem to be headed in an even worse direction in climate progress. The Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, James Inhofe, who is a Republican from Oklahoma, recently made a speech in congress denying climate change by using a snowball as his personal proof that climate change couldn’t be happening because it was cold and snowy in the District of Columbia. He also used the bible to prove that climate change could not possibly be man made, as he considered it arrogant that man could change what God had already created. He went on to say that, as long as God was active, there would always be cold seasons and hot seasons. The reason this frightens me so much is the fact that Senator Inhofe has control of the committee that sets resolutions pertaining to the environment, which means that nothing will be done in the Senate to produce legislation that could curb the effects of climate change, or try to set limits on carbon emissions.

It almost seems like we might be doomed, yet the speech made by Gary Paul Nabhan gave me a sense of hope for the future, as well as seeing the huge amount of concerned citizens who attended the climate meeting as well. If we all work together as a community, in forms of activism and protests, as well as doing what we can to mitigate climate change, I believe we can make a difference in the future, and pursue a change of policy in our own government so that we as a society can make real progress towards saving the planet.